The Rings of Powers Season Three press release is out now. I’d like to comment on just one passage from it.
(more…)Tag: fantasy
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Did you know? If you owned a particular book that came out in 2003 (23 years ago!), you would read that Wizards of the Coast proposed that you could potentially ride a gelatinous cube in your game. No one at the time, that I can recall, protested that WotC had therefore sanitized or spoiled Gary Gygax’s original vision for the gelatinous cube. If you can imagine that.
Ohh, right: This is a post specifically about Dungeons & Dragons and lore adjustments. It might not make much sense to anyone else outside the hobby.
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Here’s another installment about some of the things I learned about Tolkien and The Silmarillion by writing a book about it. This one is about how the vast spans of time in The Silmarillion are easy to overlook (and lead to assumptions), and about how no group in Tolkien’s legendarium is truly homogeneous.
read about things “uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome” -
This is the blog post version of the talk I gave at the New York Tolkien Conference last summer (2025). It also revisits a few of the things I said in my Mythmoot talk from a few years before. But all in all, it’s about the writing of The Silmarillion Primer, a book which I promise is about to drop soon. Since it’s a bit long, I’ve made this just part 1. This one’s about the characters in The Silmarillion.
Read the doom that is written -
This might be hard to articulate, but I’m going to give it a try. It’s not complicated in itself, just complicated to convey, maybe.
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In the real world, what we in the Tolkien fandom call the primary world, Orcs are not a race. They’re a mindset, an ideology, the basest outlook of humanity. Tolkien certainly thought so.
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Although J.R.R. Tolkien famously disliked allegory, he admitted there is always applicability to be found. Anyone who reads his work with any bit of care or critical thinking can find a thousand applications to the troubles of our real world—what he called the primary world. Here is just one I recently across again.
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This posts blends Dungeons & Dragons, religion, and today’s political climate—that last one being a topic I would like to generally avoid here. But this one eats away at me so I just need to work through it “out loud,” as it were.
So, a long, long time ago while working in a career far, far away, I did a bit of freelance writing for Wizards of the Coast. At one moment in time, I got to cowrite (with my good friend Ken Hart) a D&D article titled “Faith & Heresy” (in Dragon issue #387 from 2011). It was essentially roleplaying advice for players or DMs and it proposed the idea that not all clerics, even those serving the same god, have to be the same, or even believe all the same things.
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Continuing the theme of talking about the good things in life . . .
This is just a short post mostly to redirect folks to this awesome and insightful new article in the “Overlooked No Mere” series in The New York Times—which I’d never heard about before. It doesn’t appear behind a paywall, either. I guess that makes sense, since it’s an obituary series. Anyway, it’s this one:
Overlooked No More: Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien’s Middle-earth
And here’s my quick followup opinion.
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Go not to me for true film criticism, for I will say both “It was great!” and “It wasn’t that great” about almost anything. Almost.
But! It’s 2024, and I got to take my family to see a Lord of the Rings film in December just as it premiered. That felt . . . good, and a tiny bit nostalgic. I still have more enthusiasm in me than disappointment, and as always, more Tolkien is better than less Tolkien. Even poorly made Tolkien adaptations (which this wasn’t) is an excuse to talk about Tolkien . . .
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Foreshadowed and Foresung 